Minister calls firefighting dangerous, says it can have severe impacts to physical and mental health
Firefighters from Massachusetts board an aircraft on the way to the Elephant Hill Fire near Kamloops, British Columbia. Photo by Mass. Department of Conservation and Recreation.
The United States government does not have a presumptive disease policy for their 15,000 federal wildland firefighters, but British Columbia is seeking to expand their program.
From The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:
Firefighters who have battled British Columbia wildfires, fire investigators, and fire crews working for Indigenous groups will be eligible for greater access to job-related health compensation under legislation introduced Thursday.
Labour Minister Harry Bains tabled amendments to the Workers Compensation Act that extends occupational disease and mental health benefits to more people who work around fires.
The proposed changes will expand cancer, heart disease and mental health disorder presumptions to include the three other job categories, because Bains says those workers are often involved in the traumatic issues related to fires.
Presumptive illnesses faced by firefighters are recognized under the act as conditions caused by the nature of the work, rather than having firefighters prove their issue is job related to receive supports and benefits.
Bains says the government expanded the presumptive job-related conditions last year to include mental-health disorders for police officers, paramedics, sheriffs, correctional officers and most urban firefighters. He says firefighting is dangerous work that can have serious impacts on an individual’s physical and mental health.
“They will enjoy the same coverage as the other firefighters — the first responders — receive as part of giving them certain cancer protections, heart disease and injuries and mental health,” Bains said during a news conference after the legislation was introduced.
“These steps are very necessary to ensure our workplaces are the safest in the country.”
The Horns Mountain / Santa Rosa Fire is burning in Washington and British Columbia
Firefighters meet at the Canada / United States border while working on the Horns Mountain Fire. Canadians on the left and Americans on the right. Photo by Johnny Walker.
(Originally published at 4:15 p.m PDT August 28, 2018)
The 5,500-acre Horns Mountain Fire is burning in both Canada and the United States — Washington and British Columbia — east of the Laurier Port of Entry border crossing. In Canada the fire is named Santa Rosa.
In the photo above firefighters from both countries had a good natured meeting at the international border. I would wager that the topics discussed did not include tariffs or trade agreements.
Due to numerous large fires in Washington and British Columbia, both sides experienced a shortage of resources. According to an update from the incident management team, “working together was a benefit to both”.
The fire is winding down thanks in part to favorable weather in the last few days. Some resources on both sides are being demobilized.
UPDATE: August 29, 2018: When we posted this on our Facebook page Eric Haberin wrote, “Very much West Side Story”. I found the fight scene on YouTube and got a screenshot:
The Jets face off with the Sharks in West Side Story.
The big difference is that the firefighters are smiling.
Above: Saskatchewan air tanker 474 lands at Medford, Oregon July 19, 2018.
Tim Crippin shot these photos of firefighting aircraft arriving at the Medford, Oregon airport July 19. The two air tankers and the Bird Dog aircraft are owned by the government of Saskatchewan. The planes were mobilized through the Pacific Northwest Compact to Oregon; it was not an action that was taken by the National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC).
Saskatchewan Bird Dog 161 lands at Medford July 19, 2018.
The Canadians use “Bird Dog” aircraft in a role similar to lead planes in the United States. A Bird Dog usually works with two air tankers as a three-aircraft module. This one, 161, is an Aero Commander 690D.
Saskatchewan air tanker 471 lands at Medford, Oregon July 19, 2018
In addition to these three aircraft, other firefighting resources have been flowing across the international boundary in recent weeks from the U.S. to Canada:
NICC dispatched 12 wildland federal firefighters to Ontario, Canada.
The Northeast Compact sent resources to Ontario including three Type 2IA crews from New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts. However, the New Hampshire and Maine crews were demobed earlier this week and the Massachusetts crew will be demobed on Sunday.
Maine will be sending a second Type 2 IA crew to Ontario on Saturday.
The Great Lakes Compact has sent to Ontario 10 single resources (2 aviation managers and eight firefighters).
Wisconsin State will be mobilizing eight firefighters also to Ontario, Canada.
No aircraft have been sent to Canada from the U.S.
The British Columbia Wildfire Service reports that this 8 hectare (20 acre) fire is burning in steep terrain by the headwaters of the North Klinaklini River. They have assessed the lightning caused fire and will monitor the growth within natural boundaries. No communities are threatened, they said.
Above: Satellite photo taken August 2, 2017 showing smoke from some of the wildfires in British Columbia. The red dots represent heat detected by a sensor on the satellite.
It is not easy to measure and quantify the composition of the smoke and the amount of particulate matter that a huge wildfire produces when intense, large-scale burning forms towering pyrocumulus clouds that climb tens of thousands of feet into the sky. This launches the byproducts of combustion into the stratosphere — the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, above the troposphere. Once introduced at that level they have been tracked while circling the planet multiple times.
Below is an excerpt from an article by Megan Gannon at Live Science, which points out similarities between large wildfire events and volcanos.
For comparison, the explosive 2008 eruption of Mount Kasatochi, an island volcano in Alaska, sent about 0.7 to 0.9 teragrams (nearly 1 million tons) of aerosols — tiny, suspended particles — into the stratosphere, Peterson said. For months afterward, people around the Northern Hemisphere documented unusually colored sunsets, thanks to the sulfate aerosols and ash the volcano injected into the atmosphere.
Peterson’s team estimated that the British Columbia pyroCb event sent about 0.1 to 0.3 teragrams (about 200,000 tons) of aerosols into the stratosphere — which is comparable to the amount seen with a moderate volcanic event, and more than the total stratospheric impact of the entire 2013 fire season in North America, he said.
It’s well known that catastrophic volcanoes can influence the global climate. The huge 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, one of the largest in living memory, lowered temperatures around the world by an average of 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius).
The wildfire situation in British Columbia has not gotten any better in the last several days. Currently there are 128 active wildfires in the province, with four of them being larger than 50,000 hectares (123,000 acres). The largest, the Hanceville Riske Creek Fire, is getting closer to half a million acres each day.
Since April 1, approximately 591,280 hectares (1,461,082 acres) have burned in 900 fires in BC.
Hanceville Riske Creek, 172,000 hectares (425,000 acres) approximately 60 km southwest of Williams Lake.
Elephant Hill, 117,000 hectares (289,000 acres), near Ashcroft.
Tautri Lake, 76,000 hectares (188,000 acres), 80 km northwest of Williams Lake.
More than 400 additional firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and the US are expected to arrive in BC this week. Other firefighters from Australia have been in the province for a couple of weeks. More than 100 firefighters arrived from Mexico since Saturday of last week…
Officially named the Horse River Fire, it burned 589,552 hectares (1.4 million acres) in 2016, destroyed 2,400 structures, and forced 80,000 to evacuate.
Above: These two fires started at about the same time on May 1, 2016 near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Seen just after they started, on the left is the MMD-004 fire inside the city limits of Fort McMurray. The Horse River Fire, often referred to as the Fort McMurray Fire, is on the right. Alberta Forestry photo.
(Originally published at 4:04 p.m MST November 2,1 2017)
As the wildfire season slows in the western United States and Canada we have had a chance to look back on some of the more significant blazes. One of the largest in recent years, if not THE largest, was in 2016 in Alberta, Canada, the 589,552-hectare (1.4 million-acre) Horse River Fire that generally became known as the Fort McMurray Fire. It burst into the headlines when it burned into Fort McMurray destroying 2,400 structures and forcing 80,000 residents to evacuate for about a month.
No one was killed directly by the fire, but two young people died during the evacuation when their SUV collided head-on with a logging truck. One of them was a firefighter’s daughter, 15-year old Emily Ryan, one of three triplets. The other was Aaron Hodgson, her stepmother’s nephew.
Firefighters talk about “extreme fire behavior”, but this fire took it to a different level. For example, according to the report released in June, on May 4 high spread rates and downwind spotting drove the fire 40-45 kilometres (26-28 miles) to the southeast by the next morning. Convection column heights on the afternoon of May 4 reached 12.5 kilometres (41,000 feet or 7.8 miles) and lightning from the pyrocumulonimbus cloud atop the column started a number of new wildfires 40 kilometres (26 miles) ahead of the main wildfire front.
Yes, lightning from the smoke column and clouds created by it started multiple new fires 26 miles downwind.
As climate change extends the length of wildfire seasons, Alberta is no exception. Since 1994 50 percent of the wildfire acres (or hectares) burned in the province have occurred in May. And right on schedule, two fires started at about the same time on May 1, 2016, one within the city limits of Fort McMurray and another west of the city.
They were both detected by a “loaded patrol”, which is a helicopter with firefighters whose mission was to find new fires soon after they started and attack them quickly. The first air tanker group, two air tankers with a bird dog (lead plane), was on scene within 30 minutes. It would have been quicker but the nearest air tanker base, at Fort McMurray, was not staffed with tankers that day.
Below is an excerpt from the report where it discusses decisions made in the first few hours after the fire was detected by the firefighters patrolling in the helicopter.
“Complicating the situation was another wildfire that was reported almost simultaneously with the Horse River wildfire. This wildfire (known as wildfire MMD-004) was located immediately inside the boundary of Fort McMurray, and was in similar forest and weather conditions as the Horse River wildfire. Both wildfires received ground wildland firefighting crews. When air tankers arrived, AF [Alberta Forestry] officials were forced to choose between the Horse River wildfire and MMD-004 for initial air attack. [The photo above shows] both the Horse River wildfire and wildfire MMD-004 on May 1, at 18:35h.
“At the time, wildfire MMD-004 was in closer proximity to structures in the community than the Horse River wildfire and thus posed the greater immediate risk. It was also evident to the first air attack officer that applying air attack on wildfire MMD-004 was more likely to yield a successful result (a decision balancing risk and probability of success). With the exhibited fire behaviour and the time that had passed for the wildfire to gain some momentum, the Horse River wildfire was likely to outpace the actions of the dispatched air tanker groups. Crews on the ground could begin to fight the Horse River wildfire near the origin, but neither ground or air attack would be successful directly on the head of the wildfire. In the end, this judgement proved correct, and wildfire MMD-004 was successfully suppressed without damage to the surrounding values. The consequence was a further delay in the use of air attack to slow or redirect the Horse River wildfire.
“Within the first hour of commencing suppression activities on the Horse River wildfire, it became clear that initial attack efforts would not be successful in containing the wildfire. This awareness required another transition in the thinking of AF and RMWB [Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo]. Operational personnel would continue to attack the wildfire, but the plan needed to shift to the requirement for expanded operations.”
A graphic from the report showing the growth of the Horse River Fire and the resources assigned.
